As more organizations adopt and look to optimize agile development approaches, one of the questions that is most pressing relates to roles and responsibilities — specifically, about how the role of product owner compares to the role of product manager. The underlying question that many are struggling with is, should the same person play the role of both product manager and product owner, or should these be two roles be filled by two different individuals?

I’m curious to hear about your experiences, whether you’ve combined both roles under one individual or staffed the two roles with two different people. This is an area that is on the minds of many product managers working in agile environments.

Upcoming SiriusDecisions Webcasts

Last time, I mentioned that there are a number of great SiriusDecisions webcasts on the calendar in August, including a few I thought would be of most interest to my readers. These were all presented at our 10th annual SiriusDecisions Summit this past May in Nashville, and due to popular demand, we’re offering them as “replays” if you weren’t among the 2300+ delegates in attendance. I’ll be presenting this webcast next week:

August 26: The Keys to Succeeding With Integrated Solutions. So many companies are trying to focus less on individual standalone products and more on integrated “solutions.” Unfortunately, this is an area where many organizations struggle — we regularly see problems like lack of agreement on what a “solution” is, trouble identifying the right opportunities for solutions, and inability to align their internal teams to be able to effectively deliver solutions. In this webcast, I’ll be covering the keys to succeeding with integrated solutions, including the important role that solution management plays.

There were a few others we already held earlier in August. If you missed them, don’t fear — you can access recorded archives through the links below:

Product Management: The Next-Generation Toolkit. I presented along with my colleague Jill Stanek. We covered several categories of new tools and technologies specifically designed for product management use that have the potential to can improve both the efficiency and performance of product managers. This is an exciting area where we’re seeing a lot of activity, but many product managers are not even aware that these sorts of technologies exist. In addition to explaining the different types of applications relevant to product managers that are in the market, we talked about the potential business impact and the types of organizations that should consider each type of tool.

The Economics of Sales/Marketing/Product Alignment. SiriusDecisions co-founder John Neeson presented some fascinating findings from recent research that looks specifically at the benefits of aligning sales, marketing and product functions within b-to-b organizations. The presentation also covered how you can get these three revenue-producing functions aligned and the impact you should expect to see when you do.

I’ll be in Boston on Friday, September 11 with my colleague Lisa Singer to lead a workshop for the Boston Product Management Association and you can join us! We’ll be sharing best practice techniques, practical advice, models and examples for competitive analysis that we use with our clients. Competitive analysis is one area that we see product managers struggle, whether it be because they are focusing on product feature comparisons rather than strategic competitive analysis, or relying only on a limited set of techniques to gather competitive information, or gathering information on competitors but not having a consistent, objective process to analyze that information and inform decisions.

This is a great opportunity to improve your competitive intelligence gathering skills, learn new techniques, get feedback and guidance on your approach to competitive analysis, and network with other product management professionals.